


The City

by snagov



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Human, Anachronistic, Angst, Apocalypse, Graphic Depictions of Illness, Love, M/M, Plague, Surreal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:28:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25310116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snagov/pseuds/snagov
Summary: One day, a pale rider on a pale horse comes to a city on a hill.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 25





	The City

It's hard to see where the beach starts and where it ends. 

Tiresias keeps to himself, in a cave down near the southern end. The waves roll in with bright and pale whitecaps and the children play ball in a found field, bouncing the rubber toy against four stone walls. When night comes, they gather near Tiresias and his fire. They say _tell us a story, Tiresias._

So he does.

* * *

  
  


The City had stood upon a hill. 

The towers of the city were built upon the hill and tickled the sky, white and spiraling. Four walls were thick around it, protecting the city from north, south, east, and west. They were limestone and brilliantly white in the midday sun. On the eastern wall, there was one gate, by which all travelers came and left. The gate rose at sunrise and closed at sundown. Always steady, always constant. Impermeable and steadfast. The citizens of the city said you could set a watch by it, the rise and fall of the eastern gate. But most of them never left. 

Anthony Crowley was one of the few who did. The tanner's son, though old enough to be a man of his own, he was long and thin. His bones like toothpicks and his hair as red as the bad soil on the north end, where nothing ever grew. He kept his hair tied back and always wore black, so the stains of blood and tannins never showed. No one loved the tanner. Civil restrictions kept the workshop to the edge of the city, downwind and where the rents grew cheap and the shadows of the towers never allowed enough light in. It was dark and claustrophobic down here, though Crowley could never understand why, in the open air, it seemed so difficult to breathe. 

Perhaps it was the smell. Doesn't matter. 

The days of a tanner are long. The smell stuck to him, even long after the sun had set and he'd washed his hands and body twice over with carbolic soap. Over and over it goes, the same Sisphyean tasks. He would begin by tying his hair back and pulling an apron on. The cattle skins would be trimmed down first, then washed of the dirt and blood in a small canal, flowing out of the city. Then, he would place them in vats of wood ash or lime, letting the hair loosen enough to be scraped of hair by a sharp lunellum knife. Once prepared, the hides were washed and dyed and washed and dyed, plunged into and pulled out of vats and pits of caustic solutions over and over again. It took a period of three months to bring a hide from animal to market-ready leather. There was never a break.

Crowley's hands always cracked. The skin around his yellowing nails always peeled. At the end of the day, just before nightfall, he always found himself at the gate once again, a bag of tanner's trash over his shoulder, ready to be dumped anywhere but here. No city would allow it. _Dump it in the river outside, not in here,_ they said. So he did. Bones and spare skin. From the earth and to the earth again. 

Sometimes he stopped for a bit outside the gates, just before the Nox call. The stars were brighter out here, away from the lights and noise of the city. He could find his favorite constellations, pick out his favorite stars. He could hear himself think. (He had used to stop for a cigarette break here. But his mother had begged him to quit smoking and so, years ago, he had.) 

A man approached along the main road. Travelers were never uncommon. Not this late in the day, not ever. The City seemed to invite it. Their tallest tower shone a beacon at night, like something of a lighthouse, giving hope to the hopeless. It was said across the Continent that you can make a happy living in the City, that the laws were fair and the water was clear. Or, at least Crowley had heard.

He leaned against the limestone wall, hands in his dark pockets, and watched the traveler. There was something off about him but Crowley could not place it. There was nothing unusual to his pale yellow coat, his light brown boots, the white horse. Yet, still, something caught Crowley's eye and he watched the man travel along the asphalt up to the gate. 

The stranger stopped before him just as the bells sounded. _One, two, three._ A warning to get inside. Hurry up. 

"Hello."

"Hi," Crowley said, narrowing his eyes. He wore dark glasses even at night, content that the traveler saw nothing. 

"When do the gates close?"

"Nox just sounded. You've got ten minutes." 

The stranger nodded, seemingly considering the perfectly formed stone of the walls. Each brick cut so precisely as to not need mortar. No water penetrated. No wind. The people of the City wore images of the limestone wall with pride, marveling at their own engineering. The gates were heavy and black, made of something not unlike basalt but long forgotten. Their priests claimed that the gate stood first, before the wall was raised. _Perhaps God put the gate there for us and we built ourselves around it._ (Crowley always snorted at the ludicrous concept, a rare disbeliever. He stood out like a drop of vinegar in a sea of oil.) 

The stranger then glanced at the satchel behind him. "I've just come from Nessun." Crowley arched a brow. He didn't say anything. The stranger carried on and didn't seem to mind. "I've brought medicine to sell, if you're interested. Seven boxes. One hundred doses a box."

The wall was very firm beneath Crowley's shoulder blades. Firm and steady. He glanced upward at the towers and their beacon, the moonlight mingling with the lights from thousands of windows and headlights, televisions and open doors. He turned back to the stranger. There was something _wrong_ about him. But what? His eyes were perfectly spaced, a milquetoast sort of light blue. His skin was middle-aged and did not stand out as either particularly old or particularly young. His nose was neither too straight or too crooked. His chin somewhere in that ideal space between soft and sharp. There was, when it came right down to it, nothing remarkable about him at all. 

"Think we're all set," Crowley murmured at last. 

"There's sickness in Nessun." 

"Not _here_ though. But suit yourself, M'not the person to talk to." 

The stranger watched him for awhile longer and then seemed to agree. Crowley watched as he rode into the city, pale rider on a pale horse. An unquantifiable uneasiness stuck between his shoulder blades. 

When the gates began to close, he went in.

* * *

The City, where Anthony Crowley had been born and raised, was one of a kind. He might have taken out the trash every night but he had never gone far past its borders. His father had taken him up out past the walls sometimes, where the woods and water grew wild, where wolverines might have still roamed. Little adventures, too little and too late. Crowley was always hungry. He wanted to go everywhere, to know the sand on distant beaches, to know salt flats and mountains, tundras and deserts. _Let me inherit the earth._ There was still so much _more_ to the world than his walled city and its white-spired church. Go past the stained glass windows. Past the gas station on the corner, selling Cokes at two for three coins. Past it all, yes. _Anywhere but here._

There wasn't much to do in the City. Mostly, he watched people. One in particular.

There were two interruptions in the life of a tanner. Sundays were set aside for God and Wednesdays for commerce. It was always early when Crowley found himself setting up for the Market Day in the square, hoping to get a good spot near the bookseller. He arranged the tanned hides carefully, a rainbow of browned leathers, all soft to the touch. He bent over a small mirror and dipped his long fingers into a glass of water, wetting them and brushing at the fine hairs near his widow's peak, all escaping their ponytail. He didn't like his eyes, an odd sort of gold-green, so he wore sunglasses to cover them. 

The bookseller was a similar creature of ancient habits. Crowley liked to watch him. Aziraphale's table was not carefully arranged but was instead a maelstrom of books and parchments, all spread out in no noticeable order, though Aziraphale never hesitated in finding a particular title in question. Crowley watched how the sunlight glints off of Aziraphale's hair, as pale as a blank page, and the gold rims of his glasses. He had no pictures of the bookseller, so he studied the other man very carefully, reciting the features of the warm face like a rosary, something to be pulled upon later if his memory grows weak. Upturned nose, sturdy chin. Wild, thick eyebrows. Eyes that seemed to be an odd mix of blue and gold, like finding the sand in the bottom of a river. 

They had first met sixteen years ago, both thinner around the middle. Both with fewer lines beneath their eyes. Crowley had been glancing over his books for sale, admiring the tooled leather. 

"Call me Aziraphale," the bookseller had said, offering an inward sort of smile. So Crowley did. Aziraphale had extended his hand in greeting and Crowley had wiped his damn palm on his jeans and apologized for his cracking skin and yellowing nails. 

"Tanning chemicals," he had explained. 

“What is it like," Aziraphale asked, "Being a tanner?" 

Crowley had shrugged, “It passes the time.” 

Now, middle-aged and still just as dry-mouthed and nervous-hearted, Crowley watched him, thick in love. "Hey," he greeted, praying he didn't smell of lime. 

"Anthony." Aziraphale's smile, as always, was bright. 

At the edge of the market, someone coughed. No one paid attention. 

* * *

The Prince, Gabriel the Third, lived in a cathedral cut like a castle and fancied himself a priest. He held services every Sunday morning, where he spoke directly with God. Everyone in the city went. Everyone, except for Crowley and a few others from unsavory Tannery Row. Sometimes, Crowley would wait outside the Church for Aziraphale to come out. He’d lean against his oil-black car, chewing on his own nervous lip. Aziraphale would always come out safely and then Crowley would drive him home.

Aziraphale's house was on the opposite side of the City. When Crowley drove, he pushed his car past the speed limit. When he walked, he cut through the graveyard. Sometimes he nicked the flowers from the dead. Sometimes he planted more. He wanted to ask what they were doing. He was afraid to. They never touched but Crowley often stayed the night. Sometimes Aziraphale read from the Bible and Crowley asked if he believed in God. 

"Of course. I have _faith,_ Crowley. God guides us in Her wisdom." 

"But how do you know? Have you ever seen her?"

"Well," Aziraphale hesitated. "No, not in so many words. But, there is a plan for us all." 

"Then what does the plan say?"

"We don't get to know it, my dear. It's - ineffable." 

"Ineffable?"

"Yes. It is beyond understanding and incapable of being put into words." Aziraphale pursed his lips and looked very prim. After a moment, Crowley started laughing. At the sight of Crowley's laughter, Aziraphale's mouth twitched and, a second later, he joined in too.

* * *

Sometimes, on the way home from the gate, Crowley stopped in an electronics shop. He liked the hum of machinery, the crackle of static, the faint blue glow of dozens or hundreds of screens, all flickering in light and in life. He had never left the City, not past hauling the muck to the river, but computers and televisions brought Everywhere Else to him. Yes, yes, past the gate, past the walls, condensed into soundbites and webpages. He liked to haunt the little shop, taking in the latest advancements in picture quality and screen size. The televisions were typically left dialed in to the local news, all the same channel, the same message repeated on hundreds of screens. Normally, he never paid attention.

One day, a story caught his eye. Why? When he looks back, long after, he would never know. It was not a headline but a brief story. A note at the end of the program, with a scarce thirty seconds allotted to the brief report. Simply there, for thirty seconds, on dozens of screens, the words _Mysterious Illness Kills Woman in Tannery Row._ The unfortunate woman's face was shown from a happier time, smiling and healthy. Crowley stood still in the center of the shop, his own face bathed in that blue light. He had met her before, once or twice. Certainly had seen her passing through. Tannery Row, that unloved and foul-smelling corner of the city, was not large enough to afford total anonymity. 

Then again, nowhere was.

The report was over nearly as quickly as it had begun. The sticky unpleasantness clung to the back of the wind as Crowley picked his way back but, like all things we should pay attention to, it was entirely forgotten by the time he was home.

* * *

"Nessun is sick," a customer said, feeling the soft give of the leather on market display. "Do you think this bug is the same thing?"

"Dunno," Crowley shrugged. "Maybe." Their two sets of eyes flickered to the tallest tower, where the shadow lay over the southwestern corner of the city. 

"Our doctors are good," the man said, seemingly satisfying himself. He bought a yard of light brown leather and paid seven gold coins for it. The coins were heavy in Crowley's pocket in a pleasant way. The thought of the plague was heavy on his mind in an unpleasant way. Yes, the doctors. Familiar faces in the City, their robes and kits of leeches and lances. State of the art. Cutting edge. When the City beckoned to the world around it, to the poor of Nessun and the sick of Amber, it promised _come, let us heal you._ The doctors set bone and placed poultices on wounds, drawing out the infection. Health was in the mind. Good humor, strong backbone. The people of the City were too well-balanced to get ill. 

Everyone knows that.

In the end, it wasn't Nessun that the alarm came from, but from Amber. 

Amber was a city of canals and ports, their ships a common sight along the horizon. Winter always slowed down the sailing season, but it was spring now and the weather was warming. The flowers were coming and the ships too. It was the beacon that found the ship listing oddly along the shore. The beacon shining hope out like a lighthouse. Two boats were dispatched to give aid.

When the helping sailors returned, their faces were white. 

"A ghost ship," they said. No one understood. "Everyone's dead."

"Not everyone?"

" _Everyone_."

"What happened? A mutiny? A fight? Surely, there must be a reason."

The sailors said that the dead were found everywhere aboard the craft. In their beds and at their tables. Some still with their cards in their hands and eternal poker faces on their lips. Crowley watched the news as a pale-faced man spoke with the Prince, offering six boxes of medicine for sale. One hundred doses per box. He poured himself a tall tumbler of scotch and began drinking himself to sleep.

“No one is sick here,” the Prince said from his white tower. “Can't you see our walls? Who are you? What's your name? I demand to know your name."

The stranger just shook his head and took out a lighter. There, on citywide television, he lit one of the boxes on fire.

Then there were five. 

* * *

"Have you ever been outside the City?" Crowley asked. 

"No," Aziraphale said. "I've always wanted to."

"Haven't gone though? Why not?"

For a brief moment, Aziraphale stared off into the distance, somewhere very far away. "Well, I suppose it's just never been the right time. There's always the shop and inventory, keeping it open, family - "

"What if it's never the right time?" He leaned forward, breathing quick and odd. His eyes were bright. 

"Crowley, this isn't something we should think about - " But when Crowley took Aziraphale's hand, Aziraphale squeezed his fingers back and didn't pull away. Something wild twisted in Crowley's belly, nervous and starved.

"Then we won't think about it," Crowley said, leaning down to fix his boot. "Just come with me." 

"Alright."

They left, as they must, by the eastern gate. The guards paid them no attention. Who would? They were not important. Once out past the gate, where the asphalt road widened and the sky grew wider, Crowley took Aziraphale's hand again. The gold signet ring cut into his palm in a comforting way, a silent reminder of the presence at his side.

"It's beautiful," Aziraphale breathed. For a moment, Crowley's heart stopped, thinking the sentiment might be about him. But Aziraphale instead looked out at the dark and crowded wood, thick with elm and white pine, pin oaks and cedars too. Wildflowers grew dotted throughout the long grasses up to the treeline. Queen Anne's lace and black-eyed susans. 

"I wonder where we are," Aziraphale murmured, stopping to pick a dandelion. 

Crowley frowned. 

"Those histories - with Europe and Asia. Atlantis. So on like that."

"Those places aren't real."

"How do you know?"

"Everyone knows," Crowley said, shrugging in his dark jacket, though he grew uncertain himself.

Somewhere along the road, Crowley tripped. A rock tore a gash into his knee. The blood flowed like mercury, like Phlegethon, the red river of the dead. The redness of the blood had been everywhere. On his clothes, in the dirt, under his fingernails. He sniffed his hand and it had smelled like metal, like pennies, like a fired pistol.. Blood like a smashed pomegranate, crushed seeds against pale concrete.

"Sit down," Aziraphale fussed, pulling something out of his satchel. Crowley frowned.

"What's this?" 

Aziraphale shifted uncomfortably. "First aid." 

Crowley took in the white aluminum tin, the bold red cross stamped on the lid. There was nothing in there of constellations nor planet alignment, there was nothing of modern medicine. Only these ancient home remedies. A bottle of hydrogen peroxide. Bacitracin. Paracetamol. The words rolled off his tongue, sounding as alien as Sanskrit.

"Where did you get this?"

"I like antiquities," Aziraphale said, pouring hydrogen peroxide on a cotton ball and wiping it across the wound. It stung. Crowley tried not to wince. When he looked up again, Aziraphale was inches away. He watched Aziraphale lick his lips. They both drew close together, the end of the world squeezing tight. Crowley wanted to reach out and kept his fists tight instead.

"Is this - " Aziraphale hesitated. "Do you think this is unnatural?"

Crowley swallowed. "I think it's the most natural thing in the world." 

"You feel right." 

"Yeah, same, angel."

"Are you going to kiss me now?"

"Do you want me to?"

"Yes."

So Crowley kissed him and Aziraphale held on tight. The world spun and the grass bent as they lay back against, dandelions and poppies for pillows. He fumbled at Aziraphale's buttons. Aziraphale pulled at his sleeves, his thick fingers unsure. The tie fell from his throat, the shirt from his back. They kissed and Crowley cautiously reached for Aziraphale's bare shoulders. He lay underneath the weight of the other man still in a thin undershirt, still in dark jeans, exposed and nervous. His body shook, crying out _this is all I have to offer._ He was nothing special. Scars without stories to tell. What did he know of himself? O negative blood, well-cleaned nails, a man who burns fish in the pan. Who wants the incomplete?

But they were different together. Chest to chest, pressed up one against the other. The atoms of their hearts and their covalent bonds, their magnetic fields, striving toward each other. Yes, yes, connect pipe to pipe, the ductwork, the plumbing. Run the blood through the atrias, the ventricles. Let the pericardiums merge into one. Venae cavae. The last little bit of ourselves left over from before, back before God had separated us, cut us down the middle. His chef’s knife, his eight-inch blade sharp as a razor, sharp as obsidian. All wounds leave scars, our imperfect hearts beat on, ceaselessly into the future. If we’re lucky, we find our other half, seal ourselves back up again.

"I've thought about this so much," Aziraphale whispered and Crowley came for him in the palm of his hand.

* * *

At first, there were rumors. A friend of a friend was sick. Then a friend. Then it was in his own house. His cousin struggled to breathe on their own bed. They were making progress. One of the lucky ones.

“We’re past the worst of it,” his mother said, reading the depth of Crowley’s reactions. Unconsciousness is not a yes or no question. It is not black or white, up or down, in or out. There are shades of consciousness. His cousin, Bee, did not open their tired eyes but made weak grunts when pinched, when a needle was poked at the bottom of their foot.

_Past the worst of it._ Crowley nodded. His father told him to go take a walk, to buy some bread. Anything. Crowley's knuckles were still white, his hands were still cramped. He didn't exactly know how to release them. He moved toward the door in the dark, his footsteps creaking on the landing, hands trailing along the wainscot. Past the etchings of burning witches. Of Agnes Nutter, burnt to a crisp in the Pendle trials, body fat lighting up like tallow. He found the doorknob by touch. He had no idea where to go. 

So he walked. Out the gate and to the shore. On the sandbar, there was a woman fiddling with her mask. It was May, the water at the shore was still cold. Winter still hid there, in the waves, the icebox sea. The ocean is the last to let things go. She bent, shaking the roll of the land out from her legs, her arms, her waist.

“What are you doing?” He asked, looking out at the water.

“Diving for pearls." 

When she dove, her arms were straight. She snapped below the surface tension. The nothing of the splash, water opened like arms to welcome her back. The water loves us, loves humanity still. We came from it, you know that. We know it in our bones, the genetic memory of the little eukaryotic creatures we once were. We miss the waves, the sea, the sway of to and fro. Once you see the shore, you can never forget the sea. It drives men to madness, this old ache of water.

After four minutes, she surfaced with a little netting bag of oysters in one hand and her knife in the other. There was a layer of salt on her. Divers, who live half their lives underwater, are always brined. She would wash it off later, this layer of salt, but the layers were too many and too deep. The little soap won’t get them all and she would always be a pillar of salt.

* * *

Three weeks in, the stranger walked through the market. No one stood in his way. Where the stranger had once been unremarkable and gone unnoticed, now no one could look anywhere else. Few came with their wares to the market. Fewer still came to buy. But still, whether or not there was an audience, the stranger walked on with slow and measured steps. He came to the base of the cathedral and knocked upon the door. 

It didn't matter if you were there or not. The vulturous cameras watched. The sound of the knocking fist connecting with the heavy oak door was heard on thousands of television sets and radios. Everywhere, all across the city, all creatures held their breath. Great and small.

"Five left," the stranger said. 

"Buy them!" A woman hissed, somewhere in the quiet market. The Prince ignored her. 

"We're dying," a man yelled. 

"No one has died," a priest protested, though the funeral parlors never closed. Their lights were on late into the night. The morgues set up refrigerated trucks outside the hospitals and clinics. Everyone held their breath as they went past. "There's no sickness here," the Prince agreed. "It doesn't happen in the city."

In the crowd, a woman coughed blood into a handkerchief and fainted. "She's burning up," someone said.

"It's just a cold," the Prince said. "But we will take your concerns into consideration. My people are important to me." He pointed at the gate. "Seal the doors," he said, gesturing to the soldier-guards.

The doors closed for good. And the stranger grinned an unearthly grin. In front of everyone, he lit a match and burnt another box, standing well within their very walls.

* * *

They met for walks in the park. Mulberry trees lined the path. Ducks begged for bread on their quiet pond, unaware of any change to the world. They sat on a bench and Aziraphale asked to look at Crowley's knee. Crowley nodded and rolled the cuffs of his black jeans up. Aziraphale's careful fingers unwound the gauze. With his antiquated first aid kit at his side, he peeled the bandage off from the wound and cleaned up the edges. Bit of water, bit of rubbing alcohol. Wrapped it back up again. White. The blood was stopped but the wound still seeped a little. It looked clean, so neither man worried.

You would never guess it, but sometimes Crowley preferred silence. He kept his mouth running to hide the raw-edges of his stripped-wire nerves. He made the first jokes so he knew where they would land. It is always easier to cut yourself first, then you can control the bleeding. You'll know how much it might hurt. 

It was getting dark. Crowley drummed his fingers along the bench, trying to keep himself in control. He carefully did not run a hand through his mistake-red hair, did not sigh, did not breath. He simply waited and kept silent about the quivering mess in his guts. The little secret wrapped up there, within his chest. Buried under his ribs like a dark pearl.

"I have a boat," Crowley said. 

Aziraphale blinked. "What does that mean?"

"Look, angel, look at this whole mess. There's no _staying._ "

“You can’t leave, Crowley,” Aziraphale said. “There isn't anywhere to go.”

Crowley turned and stared. He was very tired and the headache behind his eyes was starting to chip away at his patience. "It's a big universe. Even if this all ends up in a puddle of burning goo, we can go off together."

"Go off together? Listen to yourself. We have nothing whatsoever in common. I don't even like you."

"You do," Crowley called, rattled to the bone.

"I'm not leaving." 

"Angel. This isn't going to magically get better." 

"I'm going to have a conversation with… a higher authority."

"God?" Crowley asked, disbelief scratching his lungs like asbestos. "You're gonna talk to _God._ You're gonna _pray?_ " 

"And what if I am?"

"Angel, look, even if God was trying to help, we wouldn't listen."

"You don't know that."

"Yeah? What about the medicine? We turned that down. Four boxes left."

Aziraphale was very quiet. "He'll buy the boxes, Crowley. You'll see. The prince will." 

When Crowley laughed, it was bitter. Hollow. "Yeah. Sure, angel. Sure, he will. When it's down to one. Or two. And then he'll keep them in his castle and lock all the doors." 

"He wouldn't."

"Fine," Crowley sighed. He dropped his hands. "Fine. Yeah. Have a nice doomsday."

This time he walked off alone.

* * *

_The Stars and Other Escape Plans_

_Where can I go? The City is out. Nessun is out. Amber too. Everywhere I touch, everywhere I look, the stories come in from the televisions and the sailors. The travelers with their coughs came, running anywhere but there, bringing the infection with them. It was in their mouths, their blood. It was in their hair and on their clothes. They reached for our outstretched hands and the sickness greased our palms. But still we reached for them. It's the most human thing, isn't it? When someone cries for help, we turn to them._

_Where can I go? And you, angel. I'll keep begging you. Get you out of there. Don't stay in your shop, boarded up with only the mice and wine for company. The Continent has a shoreline, eternal and fractal. I can build you a boat. An ark. There will be a plank and we can walk up it together, two by two._

_I showed you my favorite stars once. When you walked with me outside the gate, before they shut the City down. I swore the Promised Land to you. A wide and white foreverland. I'll name the boat Alpha Centauri, just like the star, and we'll sail on until morning. Until the birds find somewhere safe to land._

_This will not be where I leave you._

_Not here._

_Come._

_Please._

* * *

Evening came. And left. Morning came too. Everything seemed to be interrupted but the turning of the sky. The sun rose and fell, even if the gates stayed shut. At one point, they had seemed to be inextricably linked. Now, the gate sealed and the sun left to its own devices, there was once more a keen awareness of their own position in the natural world. Animals with bricks and tools, subject to wind and rain alike. We have no power if nature decides it. There but for the grace of God, we build our walls. Someday, the earth might laugh and they will crumble again. 

A knock sounded on the door. Aziraphale was on the other side, shifting nervously from foot to foot. He had packed a leather satchel with books of prophecy and several heads of cabbage. 

"About that whole - leaving thing."

"Yeah?" Crowley asked, leaning against the doorjamb, his mouth half-open. He tried very hard not to hope and missed every goal. 

"Can we still go?"

Crowley swallowed. "Yeah. Yeah, sure. We can try." 

"How?"

"There's a boat. You can come tonight if you like."

* * *

_Is this true, Tiresias?_

_Of course it's true. Would I lie to you?_

* * *

History is strange. The victors keep history, shoving it into their treasure bags with gold and jewels. History is pillage. How we are remembered is never told through our own words. Not if we are not kings or the beloved of kings. Underdogs tell no tales. We know this and hate to think about it. It's the corn stuck between our molars, that chickenbone caught in the back of the throat. The mold we scrape off the cheese before eating. Yes, this knowledge of framing. 

The Prince will write the history books. The annals will tell the story of a dark plague that came over land. That pilgrims brought it in their mean and miserable hands. That the tower fought earnestly and fell, trying to do right by the people. That awareness of the pestilence was too insidious and slow to have mounted a defense, to have done anything at all. 

This is what they will say. They will not speak of Cassandra, who begged at the steps of the castle, the fever already in her skin. They will say, _the medicine came late and we bought all three boxes offered_. They will _not_ say, _once there were seven boxes and there was plenty of time._ Be careful of what someone's telling you, the frame itself is often a lie.

How do we heal? 

Time. Time again. We wear the years like bandages. Wrap the decades across ourselves like a sling. Old scars ache when the rains come, when we stretch too far, but scars remind us that we've survived once before. That we have lived and will live again. The gates to the city were sealed. No one was allowed in, no one was allowed out. But Crowley pressed a long finger to his thin lips and led them the back way, down along Tannery Row where the fog of illness lay heaviest. They pressed leather scraps to their noses and mouths and tried not to breathe. At the end of it all, there was the small portal where the canal escaped from the City. Crowley beckoned to Aziraphale in the dark. 

"Do you want to go first?"

"I don't think it matters, does it?"

"Go then," Crowley says. "So I can make sure you get there safe." He touched a hand to Aziraphale's wrist. "I'll be right behind you. Don't worry." 

Then the dark tunnel swallowed Aziraphale whole.

* * *

They followed the canal to the shore. The boat Crowley had prepared weeks ago was still there, anchored in place. Waiting for them. 

They set sail and ravens scattered overhead.

The water was wide. The sky was wide. The boat sailed on over the open sea. Some technologies are ancient and need no improvement. Shipbuilding was ever the same, even if the boat had the aluminum hull of long-past years. The power steering was of old history. They brushed hands in the little cabin, he and Aziraphale. Washed the towels, played chess. Read. Crowley watched birds as they returned for the summer to this boreal land. He listed them as he saw them, trying to remember so that he can tell Aziraphale about them later. (There must be a later, after all.) The storm-petrel, razorbills, black-beaked woodpeckers, yellow-bellied flycatchers. Canadian geese. The boat's cabin was bare before he had stocked it and he had made do with what he could find in the blank-shelved stores. Tinned tomatoes, expired tuna, brown rice, a message in a bottle. A few sardines. He ate those, curling his nose. They tasted like the metal of the can. Like the bit of blood in his mouth. Metallic, coppery. Everything in the cabin was old. The electrical outlets only worked between ten o’clock and two o’clock. Drawers held various lengths of wire, scattered white vinyl rope, marine-ply. Some lifevests too, in a chest by the door. 

Aziraphale liked to read in the sun. The bright light left freckles on his cheeks, the tip of his nose. He had coughed once, on the third day at sea, leaving them both white-knuckled and terrified. But it has been a month now and neither show signs of illness. Thirty days at sea. Crowley had stocked the boat with food. Enough for two people for three months, so they still had long to wait. They collected rainwater in a tarp. At night, they laid on the deck and made love with no one to judge them but God and the stars. 

"What do you think it will be like?" Aziraphale asked. "When we go back?" Neither of them mentioned the possibility that they might never return. That they might get caught in a storm and capsize, death by water instead of illness. Neither of them mentioned the possibility that they might look back and the dark smoke of the crematoriums might still be burning. Or, worse yet, that there will be no one left to light the fires. 

"I don't know," Crowley said. "What are you writing, angel?"

"History." 

"Why?"

"In case no one else gets to tell it." Crowley nodded and steered the boat. Aziraphale wrote in his journal, calling it _Diary of a Plague Year._ In the bedroom, there was one small twin bed with thin blankets. Crowley, thin and sharp, caught a chill easily. Aziraphale sat behind him, warming Crowley's back with his soft chest, their hearts lined up like syzygy, beating on against the past. When Aziraphale speaks, his body rumbles behind Crowley, as soothing as a lullaby. Sometimes, the words slow to a trickle, then a stop. They drift on, the two of them alone in a star-touched sea, hand-in-hand. Little lives like driftwood on the waves. 

Crowley turned and kissed Aziraphale, hands spread across the steady chest. His world in his own palms, his world in the narrow bed. 

“I love you.”

“I love you,” Aziraphale repeated, resting his forehead against Crowley’s. “Come here.” He laid back on the light blue sheets, hard in his pajama shorts. His fingers walked the length of Crowley. His nose, his chin, the Adam’s apple of his throat. His shivering shoulders and tense stomach. Cupped him, hot and tortured between his legs. 

“Can I make love to you?”

“God, angel,” Crowley laughed. His hair was red between his thighs and his blush was red too. “You’re so old-fashioned.”

“There’s no one to hear us,” Aziraphale said, smiling and guiding Crowley down alongside him. “And I rather think you like it, darling.”

Aziraphale took him like that, bent curled on their sides, holding him all the while, warm and bright. He reaches between them and Crowley came with Aziraphale’s heartbeat drumming along his own back, cupped in love and set out to sea.

“Do you believe in soulmates, angel?”

“Pardon?”

“Yeah, you know, the idea that there’s one perfect person out there.”

“The odds of that are infinitesimal, my dear,” Aziraphale whispered but held him tighter anyway. Is _perfect_ an abstraction? A math puzzle? Can humans be added up, their values and demerits, and figured to a sum? Is there a goal? Do we aim for similar values or those that make up our differences? Is _perfect_ subjective? Who gets to choose? Which partner? Or a bystander, an angel, perhaps only God?

“No, I mean like,” Crowley looked up at the ceiling for a minute, at the bare lightbulb, briefly scrunching an eye and yawning. “Like there’s another person out there that just _fits_ you. You know?”

Crowley watched Aziraphale carefully, wondering how he might answer. Bit the inside of his mouth, worried his tongue up the back of his teeth, studied nutrition labels on a pack of granola bars. He had never been entirely good with words, he had never been a poet. How do you frame a story? He thought of the stories, stuck like a pill in the back of his throat. Alexander, who had shared a heart with Hephaestion; Alexander who had watched his blood leach into the ground at the other’s death. Napoleon, who had tried to cut out his own heart, to cast away Josephine. They had been so hungry after, trying to fill the gap where their other halves’ pulses had once been, tried to fill it up with the world.

_I love you, Aziraphale._ He let it surface, up up up through the layers of his mind, into the sun, the brackish murk of human thought. There was no fighting it, how can you not love your own heart? No, there was no fighting it, so he brushed the pale hair out of Aziraphale's eyes and hoped Aziraphale heard the words in his hands. 

_I'm terrified, angel. You assume that we have an end, you assume that we will eventually get there, that all years are our own. Look at you, a pint away from death. Heaven is not always open to me, to you, to anyone. It opens sometimes, closes sometimes. Inhales us, spits us back out again. Time might march on, but there’s no assuming that we’ll be there throughout it. They call it a fabric, the fabric of time and space. You and I are little threads, red as hearts and blood and skinned muscle, piercing in and out of it. We start somewhere and must therefore stop. What am I afraid of? Parallel lines, that you and I might run next to each other and never intersect._

“You’re beautiful, my dear.”

Crowley blushed. “You can’t just _say_ that.”

“Why not?”

He didn't have an answer. “Angel, hey,” Crowley paused, weighing the world in his hands. Considering oceans and their depths. To dive is to hold your breath against a world we cannot live within. We have no rights to water. To reach the oysters, to reach the treasure, our bodies must be risked.

_I love you._ Words like baking soda and vinegar, an explosion ready to blow off his jaw. I _love you I love you I love you._ Imperfect words. They get stuck on the dismount, get stuck between our teeth. Get a toothpick, pull it out, love stuck in our mouths. We’ll never be satisfied until we say it. Get it out get it out get it out. He has always wondered what it feels like to experience love. Now he knew, a supernova in the chest, gooseflesh, the way a wave swells at the sight of land. Like a tornado loves to smash transformers, loves to watch the sparks hit the ground. Like a wildfire. Yes, like a wildfire and like the deep sea, places where there is no oxygen.

His mouth pressed kisses into Aziraphale's hair, his soft neck, the curve of his sunlit belly. He could not breathe. His fingers were too short. He felt as if he were reaching for something and does not know what. He held his breath, diving diving diving for the bottom of the sea. What might he find there? 

Anything.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said, his mouth scarce centimeters away. He rode the surface tension of their touch. The bounce upon the shore before the dive. “Do you think we might be - "

"Yes.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” Crowley repeated and dove in. The waves parted to accept him, his clumsy form, his inexpert fumbling. Crowley groaned into the touch, mouth to mouth, tasting of salt and spit, the knocking of teeth. A bit of sweat, the curl of ache, a memory of a body that had once been a part of his own. Dive, dive, dive. Through the deep sea, through the blackness, through the terror of empty lungs. At the bottom, gather the oysters, bring them up. Put the knife in the shell, turn it like a key, the pearl inside. When his tongue entered Aziraphale, he found soft muscle there. Brine. A heart like pearls that have never seen the sun.

Why was he still afraid? Aziraphale was warm against him, as steady as a drum. To be human is to ache, to want, to fear. We are made of coarser material than angels ever have been. He didn't know why he was still afraid. It could be nothing. A fevered hallucination. Crowley ached. He wondered if he was in the burning terror between life and death. He knew that he would have dreamt of Aziraphale had he not been real. There came a mouth at his temple, a stranger at the gate. Aziraphale wrapped his sturdy limbs around Crowley's skinny shoulders, changing all the rules. 

“If I wake up and you’re not here," Crowley said, whispering in the dark, "I'll never forgive you, you know." 

“I’ll be here, darling.”

At the bottom of the ocean there are pearls. They sit in their oyster shells, waiting for us with our swimming skills, borrowing breaths in worlds we do not belong to, picking them out from the water. Down, down, further down. Past the blackness, past the pull of the current, the riptides that covet our bones, wanting to sweep us out to sea. To the emptiness, to forgetting. Down, further down. Why do we go? Because we hope for pearls. Because we are hungry and because this is our heart. 

* * *

The children had grown bored midway through the story. They had returned back to their ball game, the toy echoing on the ruined stone structure, kicked through windows that had once held glass. Dunes had eaten the building; the Earth always retakes what is hers. Tiresias dusted the sand from his black robes as he stood, walking down the long dune. 

When he looked back, the sunset shone off a small piece sticking out near the top, barely visible in the long grasses. 

White. Once, it might have been a spire.

**Author's Note:**

> Reposted with permission.


End file.
